Hello gamer! I’m sure you’ve heard the big news of the day. Following Microsoft’s acquisition of Bethesda for a zillion dollars, today Sony has purchased Bungie, developer of Destiny and former developer of the Halo series. Once again news of a major merger between hardware and software companies have sent gamers scrambling to social media to speculate as to the futures of their favorite games and consoles. In fact, if you’re anything like me, you have spent the last eight years focusing solely on gathering high scores in Geometry Wars 3: Dimensions, and if you’re like me, you’re also TERRIFIED at what this merger might mean to your favorite game of all time.
Released in 2014, Geometry Wars 3 was the sequel to the highly-anticipated (by me and Kevin at least) sequel to Geometry Wars 2: Retro Evolved. The franchise was born out of a minigame in Project Gotham Racing 2, and has gone on to become one of the most beloved twin-stick geometry-based shooters to come out in the last few decades.
Now that Bethesda has aligned with Microsoft, and Bungie with Sony, it’s only a matter of time before the bidding war starts for Lucid Games, who inherited the series after Activision shut down the series’ original creator, Bizarre Creations. Will Phil Spencer open up the checkbook and lock down exclusive rights to Geometry Wars 4? Or will Sony score it’s biggest coup yet, and blindside XBox fanboys everywhere by finally asserting true dominance in the kinda-like-if-they-made-Asteroids-now genre of shooting games that has become a favorite of many gamers, myself included?
There’s no way to know for certain how this will all shake out for all the Geometry Wars heads out there, so all we can do is be safe and strategic. If we take the lessons learned from GW2’s Pacifism mode (the best offense is a good defense) and apply them to the scary cold frontier of modern console gaming, the only conclusion one can reach is that the future is unpredictable, nothing is guaranteed, and anything can happen. Us responsible gamers must buy as many different systems with hard copies of Geometry Wars games installed on them as quickly as possible, for any day now the Citizen Kane of video games may in fact be exclusive to one platform, a crime akin to not translating the most beautiful works of literature into other languages.
This young year has already seen seismic shifts in the landscape of gaming, and as monumental as these deals seem, we all need to be ready for the fucking big one. The console wars will be won with geometry. Mark my words.